Assays for analysis of biological processes are exploited for a variety of desired applications. For example, monitoring the activity of key biological pathways can lead to a better understanding of the functioning of those systems as well as those factors that might disrupt the proper functioning of those systems. In fact, various different disease states caused by operation or disruption of specific biological pathways are the focus of much medical research. By understanding these pathways, one can model approaches for affecting them to prevent the onset of the disease or mitigate its effects once manifested.
A stereotypical example of the exploitation of biological process monitoring is in the area of pharmaceutical research and development. In particular, therapeutically relevant biological pathways, or individual steps or subsets of individual steps in those pathways, are often reproduced or modeled in in vitro systems to facilitate analysis. By observing the progress of these steps or whole pathways in, the presence and absence of potential therapeutic compositions, e.g., pharmaceutical compounds or other materials, one can identify the ability of those compositions to affect the in vitro system, and potentially beneficially affect an organism in which the pathway is functioning in a detrimental way. By way of specific example, reversible methylation of the 5′ position of cytosine by methyltransferases is one of the most widely studied epigenetic modifications. In mammals, 5-methylcytosine (5-MeC) frequently occurs at CpG dinucleotides, which often cluster in regions called CpG islands that are at or near transcription start sites. Methylation of cytosine in CpG islands can interfere with transcription factor binding and is associated with transcription repression and gene regulation. In addition, DNA methylation is known to be essential for mammalian development and has been associated with cancer and other disease processes. Recently, a new 5-hydroxymethylcytosine epigenetic marker has been identified in certain cell types in the brain, suggesting that it plays a role in epigenetic control of neuronal function (S. Kriaucionis, et al., Science 2009, 324(5929): 929-30, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes). Further information on cytosine methylation and its impact on gene regulation, development, and disease processes is provided in the art, e.g., in A. Bird, Genes Dev 2002, 16, 6; M. Gardiner-Garden, et al., J Mol Biol 1987, 196, 261; S. Saxonov, et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2006, 103, 1412; R. Jaenisch, et al., Nat Genet. 2003, 33 Suppl, 245; E. Li, et al., Cell 1992, 69, 915; A. Razin, et al., Hum Mol Genet. 1995, 4 Spec No, 1751; P. A. Jones, et al., Nat Rev Genet. 2002, 3, 415; P. A. Jones, et al., Cancer Res 2005, 65, 11241; P. A. Jones, et al., Nat Genet. 1999, 21, 163; K. R. Pomraning, et al., Methods 2009, 47, 142; and K. D. Robertson, Nat Rev Genet. 2005, 6, 597, all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties for all purposes.
Bisulfite sequencing is the current method of choice for single-nucleotide resolution methylation profiling (S. Beck, et al., Trends Genet. 2008, 24, 231; and S. J. Cokus, et al., Nature 2008, 452, 215, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties for all purposes). Treatment of DNA with bisulfite converts unmethylated cytosine, but not 5-MeC, to uracil (M. Frommer, et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1992, 89, 1827, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes). The DNA is then amplified (which converts all uracils into thymines) and subsequently analyzed with various methods, including microarray-based techniques (R. S. Gitan, et al., Genome Res 2002, 12, 158, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes) or 2nd-generation sequencing (K. H. Taylor, et al., Cancer Res 2007, 67, 8511; and R. Lister, et al., Cell 2008, 133, 523, both incorporated herein by reference in their entireties for all purposes). While bisulfite-based techniques have greatly advanced the analysis of methylated DNA, they also have several drawbacks. First, bisulfite sequencing requires a significant amount of sample preparation time (K. R. Pomraning, et al., supra). Second, the harsh reaction conditions necessary for complete conversion of unmethylated cytosine to uracil lead to degradation of DNA (C. Grunau, et al., Nucleic Acids Res 2001, 29, E65, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes), and thus necessitate large starting amounts of the sample, which can be problematic for some applications. Furthermore, because bisulfite sequencing also suffers from the same limitations as do the microarray or second-generation DNA sequencing technologies upon which it depends. For example, the reduction in sequence complexity caused by bisulfite conversion makes it difficult to design enough unique probes for genome-wide profiling (S. Beck, et al., supra), and the short reads of most second-generation DNA sequencing techniques are difficult to align to highly repetitive genomic regions (K. R. Pomraning, et al., supra), such as the CpG islands that are often methylated. Given these limitations, bisulfite sequencing is also not well suited for de novo methylation profiling (S. Beck, et al., supra).
In another widely used technique, methylated DNA immunoprecipitation (MeDIP), an antibody against 5-MeC is used to enrich for methylated DNA sequences (M. Weber, et al., Nat Genet. 2005, 37, 853, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes). MeDIP has many advantageous attributes for genome-wide assessment of methylation status, but it does not offer as high base resolution as bisulfite treatment-based methods, and is hampered by the same limitations of current microarray and second-generation sequencing technologies.
Research efforts aimed at increasing our understanding of the human methylome would benefit greatly from the development of a new methylation profiling technology that does not suffer from the limitations described above. Accordingly, there exists a need for improved techniques for detection of modifications in nucleic acid sequences, and particularly nucleic acid methylation.
Typically, modeled biological systems rely on bulk reactions that ascertain general trends of biological reactions and provide indications of how such bulk systems react to different effectors. While such systems are useful as models of bulk reactions in viva, a substantial amount of information is lost in the averaging of these bulk reaction results. In particular, the activity of and effects on individual molecular complexes cannot generally be teased out of such bulk data collection strategies.
Single-molecule real-time analysis of nucleic acid synthesis has been shown to provide powerful advantages over nucleic acid synthesis monitoring that is commonly exploited in sequencing processes. In particular, by concurrently monitoring the synthesis process of nucleic acid polymerases as they work in replicating nucleic acids, one gains advantages of a system that has been perfected over millions of years of evolution. In particular, the natural DNA synthesis processes provide the ability to replicate whole genomes in extremely short periods of time, and do so with an extremely high level of fidelity to the underlying template being replicated.
The present invention is directed to a variety of different single-molecule real-time analyses for monitoring the progress and effectors of biological reactions, and in particular detecting modifications in nucleic acid sequences. For example, the present invention provides a direct methylation sequencing technology that comprises observing the kinetics of single polymerase molecules in real time and with high multiplex. This technique will provide for fast and economical analysis of methylation patterns, even in repetitive genomic regions.